The year 2011 will be remembered as the year of hope to see 28nm graphics from AMD and Nvidia, but serious quantities and launch of most 28nm desktop graphics won’t happen before early next year. So basically, in terms of graphics developments, 2011 will not be remembered at all.

AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 / 7950, codenamed Tahiti, are expected in January and they should be the fastest AMD single-chip solutions. Now we got confirmation that there will be a dual-chip card, something that might end up branded as Radeon HD 7990 and its codename is New Zealand, or Australia Light as some like to call it.

The launch schedule places the card around March, so it’s safer to say late Q1 2012 with an option to slightly slip in early Q2 2012. Naturally this card is faster than any other Radeon HD 7000 generation 28nm card but it will also beat the Radeon HD 6990, AMD’s fastest card to date.

Good news for 2012 is that dual-GPU graphics continue to exist and we are confident that Nvidia is working on its 28nm dual Kepler card.